Category: Habitats

Blackthorn Blossom

Coxley Wood

It’s been a good year for blossom. The splash of blackthorn at the edge of the wood has lasted well and is still looking at its best.

Most daffodils are looking seedy, crocuses have vanished and as I write this I’m looking out over weedy veg beds that are crying out to be planted.

It’s National Gardening Week here and we’ve got a long Easter weekend ahead so I better get started.

Parking Lot Fossils

fossilsI decided to go for pencil and wash for this illustration for a forthcoming Dalesman article. HB pencil seemed more appropriate for grey forms and I thought that pen and ink might flatten the forms.

I picked these up at Nethergill Farm, Langstrathdale, last summer amongst the crushed limestone of the parking area. There are three fragments of sea-lily stem, a darker fragment run through with the fossil coral Lithostrotion and, at the back, a fragment of one of the valves of a fossil brachiopod.

They date from the Lower Carboniferous period, some 350 million years ago when a tropical sea covered the Yorkshire Dales.

Spring in my Step

wheel-barrowIn my determination to draw a page a day, which I’ve kept up since before Christmas, I’ve had to resort to working a lot from photographs taken on walks to fill in the gaps for particular days. What a refreshing change to have the time to get into the back garden for an hour or so to draw from life.

I feel as if I’ve got so much more freedom working from the real thing; freedom to be less literal with colour and detail. Because I’ve got a better understanding of what’s in front of my eyes I can be more playful in the way I draw it.

Whenever I go to a movie if there’s a 3D version that’s the performance that I’ll go for and it’s the same with drawing. I can relax and let the drawing flow more freely because in real life – HD, HDR and 3D as it is – I’ve got a better understanding of how things are arranged in space – for instance woodland seen through a hedge. That kind of thing can give you cause to stop and ponder when you’re working from a photograph, which breaks the flow a bit.

I’m convinced that I’ll be getting out more often as we move into spring.

My drawing might not be as resolved as the subject deserves. Perhaps if I’d had two hours I’d have gone for something more ambitious but any drawing is better than none. I look forward to having the time to go over the top with a drawing.

Jack Snipe

jack snipe

Reedbed Hide, RSPB Old Moor, 10.30 a.m.

jack snipes

Six jack snipe, bills tucked in, are resting right by the water’s edge, blending in perfectly with the dry reeds. They appear to be about the size of a starling.

It’s a good example of how useful it can be to have other birdwatchers about as we would never have picked them out and our binoculars don’t bring out the detail that the telescope, set up and trained on them, gives.

gadwallWhat I could see of the eyestripe doesn’t look very conspicuous but the stripes on the back showed up well, even through my binoculars. They’re white beneath with a dull brown breast that I’d describe as mottled rather than speckled like a thrush.

Jack snipe breed in northern Europe and join us in the winter.

Two pairs of gadwall are dabbling nearby.

golden plovers

golden ploversA large flock of lapwings and two hundred or more golden plover wheel around. A marsh harrier has been hunting over the reedbeds but we don’t catch sight of one today.

The golden plover do their own version of the famous murmurations performed by flocks of starlings, though not in such tight formation. As the flock decides on what direction it will head, a V-shaped chevron forms along its margins.

They pass directly overhead, filling my field of vision as I look up.

teal drake

wigeonTeal are dabbling around a little island.

Wigeon have come ashore to graze on a spit of land that divides the lakes.

wigeons grazing

shelducks

We’re surprised to see a pair of shelduck upending on the wader scrape lagoon. In the background there’s a smaller, squatter drake shoveller, which sits lower in the water, so we have a chance to compare these two conspicuous ducks.

wigeon

Cannon Hall Farm Sketches

I arrived in time to see the goats milked. First, as always, the large Nubian but I’m afraid after that the nannies didn’t form an orderly queue. Occasionally an extra would slip out of the pen, keen to get the small treat that is the reward during milking. Not much more than a couple of pints between the whole group.
There was no doubt that Tom was the alpha turkey, seeing off his rival with bluster and intimidating vocalisations.
I’d started drawing the left-hand sow when the second walked around the pen grumbling, then settled down right next to her.
A few grunts from the sow and piglets woke from their sleeping session and gathered to feed. Play time in the pig pen might seem like chaos if you came in in the middle of it but like sleep and feeding it’s a time-limited burst of madness. They chase around the sow, push at each other in a piglet version of arm wrestling and I got the impression that there was some informal game of tag in progress.
I was amazed how soon the piglets went into REM sleep, you could see that their eyes were moving beneath closed lids, as were the legs, running on little dream adventures. Even the little tail wagged about expressively

Gadwall & Grebe

gadwall sketchesgadwall upendingI’M IN LUCK as one of the ducks that I’d like to get more familiar with is there just in front of the hide at Pugneys reserve lake; I sketch a pair of gadwall dabbling and occasionally upending.

gadwall dabbling

The male looks plain grey but when I get the binoculars on him the finely striped breast comes into focus. The female looks rather like a female mallard.

Tufted, Shoveller & Pochard

tufteds ducks

pochardgull

Most of the other ducks are resting. Pochard and tufted duck outnumber the gadwalls by about a hundred to one but all of them are resting, head tucked beneath the wing. Occasionally they’ll all move away from the willowy bank, perhaps because they become aware of a dog passing by on the nearby path.

tufted ducks

tufted duckThey’re not adopting the sort of pose that would be useful in a field guide but I do my best to get the head-tucked-in pose down on paper and to take in their general shape and proportion.

They turn around as they float so that isn’t as straightforward as you might think that it should be.

shovellersThe shoveller are more active and a small group of males and females crosses the lake, helpfully keeping that field guide pose as they move.

shoveller

Inevitably my eye is drawn to the striking plumage of the drakes.

Grebe

grebe

grebe winter plumageI’m not used to seeing the great-crested grebe at this time of year so I take notes about its appearance and check it against the book later.

Usually we see them out on the middle of a lake where they seem larger. This one, that diving close to the hide, didn’t seem much larger thangrebe diving the black-headed gull which was following it around probably with the intention of stealing any tiddler that it might catch.

grebe preeningThe grebe is a white as a penguin beneath when it turns to preen its breast between dives.

Bookshop

Rickaro bookshopIT’S RARE for me to have a whole hour free so to make the most of it, while I wait for Barbara to finish work, I draw the  bookshop, starting with the door frame and working across the double-page spread, running out of ink halfway and borrowing a pen from Barbara to finish.

With any complicated subject I have to establish an anchor point before I can start mapping everything in its place. Those long verticals of the door frame that I started with on the left weren’t much help and it was only when I established the leaded window above the door that I was able to get a grip on proportions. The 45° pattern made a useful grid.

You can see where this went slightly wrong as the window started going into perspective on the right, my drawing equivalent to the distortions you’d get if you were photographing the scene with a wide-angle lens.

Heald Wood

A morning walk on the western shore of Lake Windermere, from Ferry House to Wray castle.

Windermere looking north to Wansfell. The tree provided a frame and a lead-in to the panorama.
The fallen tree has lifted fragments of the flaggy bedrock.
In colour the contrast was the wrong way round from the point of view of atmospheric perspective with a high key background and a monochrome foreground. Converting the image to grayscale reminds me of the high contrast prints that I aimed to make in the darkroom when I developed my own film. Photoshop is streets ahead of anything that I ever managed to do. Although I notice that I’ve over-sharpened the image; pixels don’t behave quite like film grain.
After we’d photographed the tree we turned to see this bullock standing precariously on an adjacent rock.
The bullock soon decided that the shoot was over. I think that he could be a crossbreed with some Jersey in him
I couldn’t resist attempting this rock crevice with saplings but I knew the strong contrast of sun to shadow would be too much for the dynamic range of my camera.
I had to stand in the stream to photograph the sunlit ripples without casting my shadow across the frame.
Warmth and wet had brought out fungi in Heald Wood including these growing on a tree.
A perfect clump of fungi further up the same tree as the previous photograph.

Focus on Fungi

birchbrack2

IT’S ABOUT a month since we last walked through the woods at Newmillerdam and it now feels as if autumn has arrived. Bracket fungi are starting to sprout from the fallen silver birches with shapes that remind me of the cream-filled meringues of my childhood.

A Finger on the Button

Like most digital cameras my new FujiFilm S6800 focuses on whatever is in the centre of the screen when you half press the shutter button. But what if you’d prefer to have your subject off centre?

As I should have worked out long ago when using previous cameras, if you keep button half-pressed you can then move the camera to get the composition you’re after but the focus of the lens will stay as it is, set to your subject.

birchbrack1

I think that having the main subject at the junction of thirds, rather than slap in the middle of gives a better composition. Central can sometimes be too obvious, like a passport photograph.

Throwing the background out of focus also gives emphasis to the subject.

stumpfungi2

As a record shot to help with identification it wouldn’t matter if the subject was central or the background in focus but I feel that by moving the subject to one side you introduce a little bit of narrative, a bit of expectation perhaps, and keeping the background out of focus goes a little way to building up that feeling of mystery that you get when you see fungi emerging in autumn woods.
stumpfungi

Second Nature

stumpfungi3

Inspired by the new camera, I’ve been reading Doug Sahlin’s Digital Landscape & Nature Photography for Dummies. I’m making an effort to get thoroughly familiar with its controls, so that they become second nature to me. With previous digital cameras I’ve had such good results with the auto or programmed settings that I’ve never got around to trying manual settings such as aperture priority and shutter priority.

rowan berriesIt’s the photographic equivalent of making the move from marker pens to watercolour in sketchbook work. There’s nothing wrong with in-your-face boldness in photography or in illustration but when it comes to trying to express a more enigmatic mood I think you need to develop a more subtle technique.

Wood Chip Paths

WE WERE busy over the bank holiday weekend. Going through the process of shovelling and sieving again and again I thought that it would be good practice for me to make a little step by step YouTube video.

It took about ten goes for me to record a commentary that sounded reasonably coherent!

Batley Baths

Batley baths

THIS SKETCHBOOK drawing was made from the life drawing studio in Batley School of Art, probably in the winter months of 1968, looking down on Batley swimming baths. I came across it this morning when I was looking through some of my teenage holiday journals in the attic.

The box on the windowsill is one that we were set to design and make in the college workshop. In it I can identify a pen knife, pen holder, compass and ruling pen, the tools of my trade as a foundation student, and beside it are bottles of blue, yellow and green Indian ink.

The yellow box on the left contains children’s wax crayons; ‘Noddy’ crayons, branded with the name of the Enid Blyton character.

Batley bathsRubbing these crayons on my sketchbook page laid the foundations for a kind of poor man’s scraperboard which I then, with difficulty, painted over with India ink which I could then scrape through to produce highlights such as mouldings, mortar and leaded windows.

This is a long and laborious way to produce a drawing but it’s evident that I enjoyed building up the textures.

It’s successful in bringing back to me the drabness of Batley at that time when smokeless zones were a recent innovation. I love the dour stonework and the glowering skylights which you can’t imagine would ever allow fresh air and sunlight filter down into the changing rooms below.

I never swam in these baths.